Smart Home: Ultimate Connectivity and Experience

By Fang Hui, Vice President of ZTE Corporation

With the emergence of high-bandwidth services such as 8K TV, Blu-ray videos, and VR games, users’ requirements for home networks are ever-increasing. Home connectivity has become a hot topic in the industry. The concepts of “smart home” and “whole-home ultra-gigabit” are gradually popular around the world. In order to achieve this goal, ZTE believes that it is necessary to build a connection base for homes first, carry out technical iterations in terms of bandwidth and coverage, focus on user experience at the same time, and use the connection base to guarantee the network environment and develop new services. In this way, the leap from “building a solid network” to “making full use of a network” can be achieved.

Improving the bandwidth at home is the basis to build the connection base for smart homes. The large-scale commercial use of 10G PON ONTs in China drives the rapid development and maturity of the global industry chain, and the cost for operators to deploy 10G PON services is obviously reduced. At the same time, with the soaring of high-bandwidth services, GPON can no longer meet the requirements of home users for new services. Only the 10G PON deployment can meet various service scenarios in the future, stabilize existing users, attract high-value new users, and stand out in the fierce competition. We can say that it is a good opportunity to deploy 10G PON.

Improving Wi-Fi performance is the key to building the connection base for smart homes. It is estimated that Wi-Fi 7 will be commercially available in 4Q 2023. By leveraging a number of new technologies, such as 320 MHz channel, 4096-QAM, and Multi-Link Operation (MLO), Wi-Fi 7 provides four times higher rate than Wi-Fi 6, and greatly improves efficiency, security, and stability, which better guarantees large-traffic service scenarios in the future. ZTE predicts that the market share of Wi-Fi 7 will continue to increase, and will be equal to that of Wi-Fi 6 in 2028.

Ensuring network coverage is of primary importance for building the connection base for smart homes. ZTE Mesh solution supports whole-home coverage and wireless roaming to help operators solve user pain points and increase the ARPU value. ZTE Mesh solution has been put into large-scale commercial use by a number of operators worldwide, and ZTE has launched the industry’s first EasyMesh R4-certified ONT. Another hot topic is FTTR, a one-stop solution that replaces all transmission media with fiber. With no upper limit of rate and the low loss feature, fiber helps achieve real “whole-home ultra-gigabit”, so that users can enjoy ultimate home networks. ZTE FTTR solution has been put into large-scale commercial use in China, and has been piloted in Europe, Asia-Pacific, America, and the Middle East. ZTE believes that in the near future, FTTR will change from a pilot solution to a small-scale commercialized solution in the international market, and will gradually become a mainstream solution.

The goal of smart homes is to provide ultimate user experience. In terms of network management, the cloud platform has become the mainstream choice for operators. Operators and home users can implement visualization and management of devices and networks in users’ homes through the cloud platform. The remote fault diagnosis function helps operators simplify the management process, reduce O&M costs, and improve user experience. ZTE SCP solution has mature commercial experience. In terms of smart home services, the ultimate connection base can enormously help operators carry out smart home services and provide smarter, more convenient, and more interesting living experience to users. ZTE has launched the IPC smart camera products in the international market, and will launch more smart home devices to create a complete smart home solution. At 2023 MWC Barcelona, ZTE fully demonstrated the smart home solution. With connectivity as the basis for homes, the solution provides ultimate whole-home ultra-gigabit experience through bandwidth enhancement (10G PON/Wi-Fi 7), coverage enhancement (Mesh/FTTR), and experience enhancement (SCP/Wi-Fi Sensing).

ZTE is willing to carry out in-depth cooperation with global industrial partners to build solid networks and connection bases by deploying 10G PON gateways and upgrading to Wi-Fi 7, improve network coverage and provide whole-home ultra-gigabit experience through the Mesh and FTTR solution, and improve operators’ management capability and user’s living experience through deploying SCP and smart home services. In this way, home network technologies can be upgraded and user experience can be optimized.